Amy led the first wave of NHS volunteers in the fight against Ebola in Sierra Leone and was named the UK’s 200th Point of Light by Prime Minister David Cameron in 2015. In 2011 she dedicated seven months to running a hospital in northern Sri Lanka with Médecins Sans Frontières in the aftermath of the civil war. In 2013 when Typhoon Haiyan hit the Philippines, she deployed as part of the UK medical team to support the relief efforts. Clinically she works part time as an Emergency Medicine specialist at Derriford Hospital in Plymouth.

UK-Med, the medical emergency response charity based at the University, and staffed by academic colleagues from HCRI, has become the UK’s deployment lead to global humanitarian crises, with an £8m grant from the government.

Humanitarian and Conflict Response Institute (HCRI) is a leading global centre for the study of humanitarianism and conflict response, global health, international disaster management and peacebuilding, based within the School of Arts, Languages and Cultures.

Funding is being provided by The Department for International Development to carry out support, education and training for health care workers on the UK International Emergency Trauma Register and the new UK International Emergency Medical Register.

The registers, the first of which was set up by UK-Med in 2011, have trained hundreds of volunteers, ensuring there is the right mix of skills, training and experience to respond to specific international disasters. In recent years clinicians have been deployed to Sierra Leone to help in the fight against the deadly Ebola virus, to the Philippines post Typhoon Haiyan, to the Gaza conflict and to Haiti and Nepal in response to earthquakes.

Professor Tony Redmond OBE, Deputy Director of HCRI and Head of UK-Med, said: “UK-Med is unique, as a humanitarian non-governmental organisation (NGO), in its relationship with HCRI and the University, which provide academic oversight and direction to the training and deployment of teams to the field. In this country we are in the privileged position of being able to respond to emergencies and I believe it is our duty to help people in distress if asked and we have the skills to do so.”

HCRI becomes WHO Collaborating Centre for Foreign Medical Teams

HCRI has been designated World Health Organization (WHO) Collaborating Centre for Foreign Medical Teams and emergency capacity building. Professor Tony Redmond OBE is Head of the Collaborating Centre. As the Collaborating Centre, HCRI will focus its support to the Foreign Medical Teams Office at WHO, to capacity building in Disaster Prone Countries and to research.